John Bauer executes each of his works with a limited palette of gloss and matte blacks, silver and chrome. He begins each painting with a simple computer schematic and develops the work through a process that incorporates the artist’s brushwork as well as “hands-off” painting techniques such as stenciling, silk-screening and spray painting, turning digitized graphic imagery into fields of abstract dystopia.

Through Bauer’s repetitive and serial forms, emotive narrative distance and his detached processes of working, he gains a subjectivity that expands the definition of what makes a painting formally successful while walking a line between beauty and disjuncture which stems from the communication of an overwhelming urban experience. Encouraging a friction between additive and subtractive elements, each painting focuses upon his deft ability to intersect modes of painting to create powerfully expressive images. Bauer decentralizes the picture plane with grid-like modular units, denying the accessibility of spatial illusion; he furthers this with his limited palette, encouraging a hierarchical breakdown between positive and negative space where compositions both dissolve and rematerialize simultaneously.

It is these inherent contradictions of meaning and authorship that Bauer exploits within his work and working methods. That said, Bauer is extremely concerned with both the autonomous quality and anonymous nature of each painting—their ability to stand both independently and invisibly before the viewer.